Two words: Term Limits. After more than thirty years of conducting business for the guvmint, those tats on Addison’s mug represent just a smattering of the corporations and their products that have helped make him the 11th wealthiest member of the Senate.

If that’s true, then we should start pretending Democrats aren’t too chickenshit to lead start finding ethical ways to get Democrats and Independents to actually VOTE; the Republicans have already found the unethical ways.

Some talking head actually said “the Republican wave of victory” was the result of “methodical plotting and careful candidate vetting.” (Perhaps to ensure their candidates weren’t publicly recorded blathering on about second amendment remedies, legitimate rape, not enough guns in church, etc.) It was, of course, just the usual relentless combination of fearmongering and propaganda; e.g., Have a double dose of Ebola pudding with your ISIS coronary, fellow petrified patriots! (Seriously: did anybody read Jacques Ellul’s book?*) And we must not overlook the gargantuan sums of munny being spewed by the corporate overlards— $3.67 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics— which make the soupçon economic-cultural bandaids of new minimum wages in Alaska, Arkansas, and Nebraska and legalized cannabis in Alaska, Oregon, and D.C., seem starkly ludicrous by comparison.

Other talking head chatter awards this latest shift in power directly to the credit of Mitch McConnell, whose strategy of blaming everything that’s wrong in the world on Barack Obama has been wildly effective. Sure, you may see a picture of Barack sipping alcohol in the Green Room with Addison, but it won’t be Kentucky Bourbon, it’ll be Jack Daniels Old Number 7, (see Mitch’s throat, above) and don’t be surprised if McConnell doesn’t drink a drop.) And now that they’ve been handed the keys to the same vehicle Obama has finally driven out of the ditch, GOPpers can get back to the business of repeatedly running over ObamaCare and bleeding the last dime out of the dregs of the middle class; or, as they like to call it, “governing.”

Roughly sixty percent of Americans didn’t bother to vote in yesterday’s election. It varies from state to state of course, from a low 28% in Indiana, to 59% in Maine, but generally only a third of the eligible population bothers to show up. In a word, disgusting.

There are some things we could do to turn this around. Do like Australia does: fine the shit out of anyone who doesn’t cast their ballot; make the fine commensurate with total income, and make it hurt.

Mandatory suffrage would not be without problems, just as it is now in the hands of our uneducated and propagandized majorities. But the continued election of base and ignorant politicians (Gohmert, Bachmann, Kruz, Barton, King, Schweikert, Rand, Rubio, Kyl, Emmer, Comstock, Grothman, Mooney, Buck, Hice, etc., etc.) is a very real threat and present danger to our democracy.

Representative government presupposes an intelligent, efficient, honest, and universal electorate. The character of such a government always depends on the character and caliber of those who compose it. But when fifty percent of a nation is inferior or stupid— and possesses the ballot— that nation is doomed.
The total dominance of mediocrity will spell the downfall of our nation.

WASHINGTON— House Putterer John Boehner (R-OH.M.G.) was ragging to the press earlier today about President Barack Obama’s strategy against ISIS, saying “butts on the ground” would be needed, because, well, that’s just how “we roll.” He was reluctant to say just whose butts he intends to roll into harm’s way.

“At the end of the day, uh, I think it’s gonna take more than, uh, airstrikes and billions of dollars to drive them outta there,” Boehner said. “At some point, somebody’s spawn has gotta get their butts blown off.”

Reporter Mal Aprop of BSN asked if that meant American butts.

“Listen, the president doesn’t want to do that, because he doesn’t have the stomach for killing, no matter what the reason. But if I were the president, I probably wouldn’t have talked about what I wouldn’t do, or, uh, you know, what I might do. Or even what I would do do. But where I come from, War always means butts on the ground, so somebody’s butts have to be there.”

“So you would recommend putting American butts on the ground, then?” asked Aprop.

“We have no choice,” Boehner sobbed, dabbing away tears. “These are Conan-like barbarians. They said they wanna kill us. So unless we all just wanna lay down and die, we’re gonna hafta pay the price and, uh.. send some more of your children’s butts over there to die.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid(D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, threatening to end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if he becomes the majority leader. “There not a doubt in my mind that if the majority breaks the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate with regard to nominations, the next majority will do it for everything,” McConnell said on the floor

Let’s roll the tape back to last January, when the new Senate, vis a vis the the 2012 election, was seated. At that time, which correlated with a 2 year cycle governing Senate rule changes, Reid could have proposed any rule changes that he wanted, including all cloture matters, and implemented them via a simple (non-nuclear) majority vote, which the Dems would have won hands down.

Instead, he was punked by McConnell, who promised to be a good boy and not abuse the 60 vote threshold re vital Senate business. Reid, a genuine conservative when it comes to protecting Senate tradition, took him at his word. Ya know, the Senate being “the greatest deliberative body in the world” and all that crap.

Now, I had always assumed that it didn’t matter what kind of handshake deal wanna be Senate Leader McConnell made with Reid. McConnell would junk tradition for even transient power. That’s just the way the modern GOP rolls. It was so obvious to me (and I assumed, other progressives) that I didn’t consider it worth posting about.

Sigh. But, alas, that time has come. I leave it to Big Orange blogger brooklynbadboy to do the honors. As he says, “the cat is out of the bag”:

Senate Democrats need to get this through their thick skulls: Republicans don’t give a shit about “Senate comity.” They’ve proven that time and time again. Nor do they give a shit about Senate traditions or the proverbial “one day it might be us” crap that Democrats box themselves in with. They will abuse the filibuster now and get rid of it completely when they get the majority. It doesn’t matter at all what Democrats do. Republicans are going to be Republicans. So let’s just end this ridiculous farce now and just get rid of the whole goddamn thing and restore majority rule as the Founders wrote into the Constitution. McConnell and the GOP certainly have the guts to do it. The question is, do the Dems?

Today’s GOP, split between its traditional Wall Street moneyed interests and its hyper-ideological Teabagger contingent, the reincarnation of its former discredited Bircher wing, has reached new levels of political dysfunction. (Its other faction, Christian fundamentalists, has been rather quiescent of late, most likely due to a paucity of pending national social legislation.)

It’s as if GOP icon Ronald Reagan had, after firing the air traffic controllers, replaced them with the inmates of Ken Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest and Christopher Lloyd’s Dream Team.

Less than two weeks ago, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy walked upstairs to Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s Capitol office to discuss a sensitive issue: Why did Cantor schedule a vote before McCarthy had the chance to survey Republican support?

The meeting — described as “tense” by several people familiar with it — ended with McCarthy abruptly standing up and storming out of the room. Aides downplayed the exchange. But a week later, it turned out that McCarthy’s pique was merited: The health care-related bill was suddenly pulled from the floor in what was the most recent stumble for House Republicans.

The GOP leadership is dealing with an unprecedented level of frustration in running the House, according to conversations with more than a dozen aides and lawmakers in and around leadership. Leadership is talking past each other. The conference is split by warring factions. And influential outside groups are fighting them.

The chaos has led to a sense of stalemate for House Republicans, who have been in the majority since 2011.

Of course, if you listen to the Beltway Insiders, it’s all President Obama‘s fault for the resulting political gridlock. His failure to herd these crazy cats into an actual functioning body of legislators is proof positive of his “lack of leadership.” At Wednesday’s news conference, for instance, O was asked by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl whether he had lost his “juice” to get things done. O replied:

“But, Jonathon, you seem to suggest that somehow these folks over there have no responsibilities and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That’s their job. They’re elected — members of Congress are elected in order to do what’s right for their constituencies and for the American people.”

“Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.”

Excuse me if I think that is just plain stupid. Mitch McConnell promised from the very first day that Obama took office, the GOP’s first priority was to prevent the duly elected President of the United States from implementing any part of his agenda. Four and half years later, that dedication to obstructionism hasn’t changed a wit, as Senator Pat Toomey acknowledged when explaining the defeat of a greatly watered-down bipartisan gun safety bill that would require mandatory background checks on all gun purchasers:

“In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so polarized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”

Some? Okay, maybe there are some vestigial traces of moderation among “some” members of the GOP. But the promise of “scoring” by lobbying groups like the NRA and the various Koch Brothers funded organizations means that if individual GOPers even thought about compromising with Obama they’d have their asses primaried in a heartbeat.

The logical end point of this blind ideological obstructionism is that the Rethugs have rendered themselves incapable of taking yes for an answer. Take the Affordable Care Act. (Please.) Though Obama thought nothing of pissing off his progressive base by refusing to pursue a public option, let alone a simple single payer expansion of Medicare, he instead adopted the Heritage Foundation‘s individual mandate construct that Mitt Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts. Notwithstanding that Senator Max Baucus, the chief architect of the Act, adopted the individual mandate as the core principle of “Obama Care”; and furthermore, made numerous changes demanded by the Rethugs, not a single one of them voted for the Act. How’s that for bipartianship delusion, Mr. President?

MODO concludes with her best advice on how to transcend GOP obstructionism on the issue of closing GITMO:

“The senior senator from Kentucky has been a leader in Keep-Terrorists-Offshore. Maybe, if the president really wants to close Gitmo, he should have a drink with Mitch McConnell. Really.”

Really? Maybe Obama should order Marine One to deposit him on the track at the Kentucky Derby Saturday afternoon, walk down the steps dressed like a Southern waiter with a towel over one arm and a tray with a frosty mint julep on it, straight over to Mitch’s box seat, bow and say:

“For you, Massah McConnell. Is there anything more I can do to pleasure ya’all?”

Now that’s the kind of leadership the Village courtiers would really appreciate.

James Mountain Inhofe may not be the craziest tool currently in the Repug Shed, but he’ll serve as a fitting representative bobble-head for the whole lot of them in our year-end retrospective of some of the more insane Repugs we’ve enjoyed pillorying in 2012.

The new year always bring fresh opportunities for renewal and success, but 2013 is also virtually guaranteed to bring US another year’s worth of shockingly insane shenanigans by actually elected Repuglicants, wannabe elected Reptilicans, along with the usual dung-cart load of Right Wing media pundicks and professional bloviators. The clock is ticking down, so let’s not waste another minute. Here in no particular order, of course, are some of our favorite insane Repugs, depicted in our favorite way:

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There’s no denying we dodged a very expensive corporate fusillade when we voted to throw this flaccid duo on the dung heap of political effluvia.

“The [politicians] of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”
—Nikola Tesla

No, that’s not a carrot. John Boehner was, until recently, the undisputed leader of all that wreaks crazy on the Hill. But times are changing, and an eight inch proboscis doesn’t carry the weight it once did, especially with the elephantine Tea Bag trunks that are wagging today.

“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

Mitch McDumpty sat on the wall,
Mitch McDumpty did nothing at all.
All the GOP asses— all the GOP men—
Did nothing to help the people again.

Newton Leroy Gingrich would have been the most insane Philanderer-in-Chief evah, in Washington, or Moon Base 1.

*

Jan Brewer ran unopposed for our unofficial but heart-felt finger-wagging award as the Rudest Bitch in Government. Rudest Bitch Not in Government was a three-way tie between Mr. Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Pam Geller.

While we’re talking bitches:

Sean Hannity, another perennial fave, makes our list every year as “The Transparently Stupid Guy Who Tries The Hardest Not To Appear Transparently Stupid.”

“The stuff that comes out of Sean Hannity’s mouth has been infuriating. The stuff that Bill O’Reilly says has been illogical. You go up and down the schedule and it’s insanity over there. The number of lies, perpetuated, promoted by Fox News is just shameful and it hurts everybody. ”—David Shuster

Sean and Bill gitty-up; no, those are toy guns.

The Three Fux Stooges

•

We admit to heart palpitations over the closeness of Michele Bachmann’s last race; cuz we need one totally insane person in the Congress just so we never let up on our efforts to, well, get all the insane people out of Congress.

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” —Marcus Aurelius

Nobody moves the insane in the membrane goalposts farther or faster than Donald tRump, who just cancelled construction on his insane, literally underwater, 24 million dollar boondoggle “catering hall.”

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein

W.T.F.

•

Karl you ignorant slut.You look perfect in prison orange.

“In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care, do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed into acquiescence.”
—Kurt Nimmo

Hucka-Chickabee is off the diet and on the crazy train again with his insane comments over the Newtown massacre. His dependability as a nut job is often staggering, but now it’s also caused by his gross tonnage.

Resplendent in her make-believe Presi-Queen victory dress over First Runner-up Loser Carrie What’s-her-name and Second Runner-up Loser Willard Romney, Sarah wore an elegant strapless gown with a fitted ruched bodice accented with gorgeous lace piquewadeens¹ and hand-beaded details; the silk and taffeta fabric was spun exclusively for Mrs Palin by 100% American Evangelical silk worms. Romney’s dress, on the other hand, was valued at over $14 million dollars, and was custom made on Planet Kolob from pure unrefined evil.

“There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”—Frank Zappa

•

I’m already feeling a disturbance in the Force, so Ima stop here.

Best Wishes for a fabulous and progressively great new year, see you there.
Power to the People. Live in Light and Love.

The only thing preventing President Obama from once again becoming a pariah among progressives is the Teabagger python that squeezes the GOP harder every time it even contemplates the word “compromise.”

In the latest round of budget negotiations, Obama has broken his campaign promises to:

1. Exempt the first $250k of everyone’s income a slight rise in taxes, back tothe rates that prevailed during the go-go years of the Clinton Administration. Instead, he raised the threshold to $400k, reducing government revenues by $300 billion in the process.

2. Hold discretionary budget cuts to $1 trillion. Instead, he added another $300 billion in order to pay for the loss of revenues above.

3. Keep Social Security off the table. Agreeing to cut cost of living increases by adopting a “chained CPI” accounting formula. As Jane Hamsher at The Lake explains, no one should be surprised by Obama’s willingness to “adjust” SS benefits, despite what he said during the campaign, given his track record on the subject.

Add to that the additional $1.5 trillions of cuts Obama agreed to in 2011, and Obama has offered to cut the budget a whopping $2.8 trillion. You’d think that the Rethugs would have jumped at the chance to reduce the size of government by the largest amount in history. Then again, they and their billionaire sponsors are far more interested in individual tax cuts than reducing the debt, as the last 20 years of Republican administrations have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Which brings us to the latest riot in the asylum known as the House of Representatives. Unable to muster any support whatsoever for Obama’s latest capitulation negotiation, Speaker of the House John Boehner instead hatched his own plan he named “Plan B.” (Plan Boner? Plan Bourbon? Plan Bust?) The Boner Plan did finally accept an increase in income taxes, but only on the uber rich, i.e. the top .2%. Blowing past the 250k and 450k thresholds, he raised it to $1 million, starving the government of revenues even more, without even mentioning off-setting budget cuts, let alone specifying which ones. [Edit/Update: ThinkProgress has a side by side comparison here.]

Boehner was under no illusion that it would ever pass the Senate, let alone survive a veto by the president. Thus it was a strictly political maneuver, probably meant to signal that he could deliver his caucus despite the caterwauling from his wingnut right. He went before the cameras, speaking confidently that he had enough votes for passage. He could thus leave town for the holidays, the ball in the president’s court.

Unfortunately for The Orange Man, he can’t count, can’t count on his own party to back his play. (Why he thought the no-tax-at-any-cost-crowd would all fall on their swords in a futile gesture is beyond me.) At the last minute, he pulled the bill from the floor, admitting that he didn’t have the votes. Hand that man an exploding ceegar…

How Washington has become so utterly paralyzed is detailed by Robert Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute) and Thomas Mann (Brookings Institute) in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.” They continue their analysis in a recent WAPO op-ed “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem“:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

Something that’s been obvious to progressives for decades seems to be finally seeping into the sclerotic brains of The Beltway Village People. Here’s what Ornstein and Mann say about the enabling contributions of The Fourth Estate, who have fully internalized the fallacy of false equivalency:

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

Conservative ideology itself plays a substantial role in the dysfunctionality that has turned the US government into a chaotic three ring circus that has the rest of the civilized world shaking their heads in disbelief:Continue reading »

ABIDE.

MICHAEL HART

You humans have begun an endless unfolding of an almost infinite panorama, a limitless expanding of never-ending, ever-widening spheres of opportunity for exhilarating service, matchless adventure, sublime uncertainty, and boundless attainment. When the clouds gather overhead, your faith should accept the fact of the presence of the indwelling Adjuster, and thus you should be able to look beyond the mists of mortal uncertainty into the clear shining of the sun of eternal righteousness on the beckoning heights of the mansion worlds...
—The URANTIA Book